Anyone else notice significantly more ram utilization after this months security patch?

Posted by applecorc@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 28 comments

We have monitoring software for our devices. Post patch we're getting alarms for high ram utilization. For example, this is a new Dell desktop PC that was provisioned 10 days ago and hasn't been deployed yet. We rebooted it on the 17th to see if it resolves it, and within hours it's tripping alarms again. The offending process is ServiceShell.

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InstructionDirect773@reddit

Yeah this happens every time with security patches, they usually bundle in extra background processes that'll chill out after a few days once indexing/scans finish - check your task manager to see what's actually eating the RAM before you escalate to IT, saves everyone time.

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oversizedmoosecalf@reddit

Just out of curiosity, how much memory does task manager say you have available?

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BlockBannington@reddit

Imagine it say 3,2 GB and he accidentally installed 32 bit Windows

(I know it doesn't exist anymore, but imagine it does for the joke)

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BlockBannington@reddit

My Dell Pro Plus gave me a warning to clean the dust filter (?) since my laptop has been heating up like crazy since a month or two. This shit is brand new, i7 32 gig. I have vs code open not doing shit

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Lt--Spicy@reddit

Out of the 900 VMs and roughly 100 physical that are all patched every month, no.

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981flacht6@reddit

My chrome has been hitting 80% lately and I have 32gb. I have the idle setting on in Chrome too. At work.

But I'm also insane with the tabs.

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WiskeyUniformTango@reddit

Im modest with my tabs and got to 95% mostly from chrome. 10 tabs. Also have edge open with more tabs but it is normal usage.

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981flacht6@reddit

Oh man I usually have 80-90 tabs.

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Internet-of-cruft@reddit

OneTab is the way for me :)

I chronically have this many tabs but I try to group them based on task then I use OneTab to suspend them & label them.

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Internet-of-cruft@reddit

Some web pages are absolutely out of control too. Microsoft admin portals and Arista's AVD docs page seem to balloon memory by 2 GB from one tab.

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Internet-of-cruft@reddit

I don't know man. Here I am suffering running W11 on 16 GB of RAM.

I have to close practically every background & foreground app and stick to running 1 or 2 programs at a time because my employers software stack consumes such a huge amount of memory.

Talking about sitting at 10 GB idle memory usage running nothing. Outlook adds 1 GB. Teams adds 1.5 GB. Cisco Webex adds another 1 GB. Toss Chrome in with the fucking Azure Portal and I'm at 2 GB running two tabs.

Now I'm at 15.5 GB and my system starts paging to the (admittedly fast) NVME drive. But I can feel how much slower it is.

It's insane. I had to give my manager performance counter metrics throughout the workday so I could justify getting another DIMM of RAM.

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doubleknocktwice@reddit

It would be nearly $100,000 to upgrade all laptops to 32gb RAM now. I may have no choice soon.

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Internet-of-cruft@reddit

The 16GB upgrade for me was $200, ordered on Tuesday this last week.

Expensive but not unreasonable.

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applecorc@reddit (OP)

I hear that. My main concern is these are running idle, with baseline software, and no users logged into them.

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mcmellenhead@reddit

Another thing.... Dell optimizer causes issues, and I've seen support assist basically show signs of memory leaks.

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Splask@reddit

Dell optimizer has always been trash. Thats gets removed immediately.

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CupOfTeaWithOneSugar@reddit

There is still no automatic way to do that right?

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MrXk0@reddit

Just curious, might share what monitoring tool are you using?

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dinominant@reddit

Google cloud is distributed to run on all Chrome tabs.

Azure runs on all Edge tabs.

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98723589734239857@reddit

had that for a while as well on dell micros. 80% usage on 16 gig machines without anything running. persistent after reinstalls too. i think it might have been a video driver issue, it fixed itself after a while

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bjc1960@reddit

we are getting complaints. We have 80 computers still at 16 Gig RAM. I am short about $85,000 to upgrade.

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Constant-Position601@reddit

I’ve noticed it on workstations that host Hyper-V VM’s. I had previously used 3 VMs on a single host but now have trouble loading 2.

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2script@reddit

Yes. Lot of complaints from users. Noticed that when you open word, it spawns a copilot instance. So if you have a lot of word docs open (e.g. typical executive), ms word RAM usage is a lot higher than it used to be.

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Secret_Account07@reddit

I need to check our GPOs on these features. So sick of MS fucking stuff up lately

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MeetJoan@reddit

ServiceShell spiking after this month's patches on idle machines with no user logged in points pretty strongly to Recall or a Copilot-related background service spinning up. The April patches enabled Recall on more device configurations than before and it runs indexing in the background even without an active session.

Check Task Manager for AIXHost.exe or CaptureSvc.exe running alongside ServiceShell — those are the Recall components. If they're there, you can disable via Group Policy under Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows AI or kill it with Disable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Recall in PowerShell.

Definitely worth confirming before wide deployment. Last thing you want is Recall silently indexing screens across production machines.

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